HTML to PDF API pricing compared

What generating invoices, reports or exports as PDFs actually costs per year on six HTML-to-PDF APIs, at three steady volumes, from their public pricing pages (checked 19 October 2026). We run one of them (Shotmint), and it is not the cheapest at every volume: see below.

Rules: the cheapest plan whose monthly allowance covers the volume, billed monthly, ×12. Annual-billing discounts (about 15 to 17% at PDFShift, html2pdf.app and pdflayer) are not applied. Api2Pdf bills by usage, so its figure uses the per-PDF estimate on its own pricing page (0.1 MB, 2 seconds of compute); heavy or slow pages cost more there. PDFShift and html2pdf.app count one credit per 5 MB of output, so large PDFs use several credits; Shotmint and the others count one per document. Competitor prices are in USD, Shotmint's in EUR. Prices change: check each pricing page before deciding.

200 PDFs a month (2,400 a year)

API and plan	Per year
Shotmint 2 × €5 packs (2,000 each), plus the 100 free renders	€10
Api2Pdf $1/mo base + about $0.10/mo usage	about $13
PDFShift Starter $9/mo (500)	$108
html2pdf.app Startup $9/mo (1,000)	$108
pdflayer Basic $9.99/mo (1,000; the free tier is non-commercial)	$119.88
DocRaptor Professional $29/mo (325)	$348

1,000 PDFs a month (12,000 a year)

API and plan	Per year
Api2Pdf $1/mo base + about $0.49/mo usage	about $18
Shotmint €19 pack (10,000) + €5 pack (2,000)	€24
html2pdf.app Startup $9/mo (1,000)	$108
pdflayer Basic $9.99/mo (1,000)	$119.88
PDFShift Boost $24/mo (2,500)	$288
DocRaptor Max $149/mo (5,000; Premium covers only 1,250)	$1,788

10,000 PDFs a month (120,000 a year)

API and plan	Per year
Api2Pdf $1/mo base + about $4.91/mo usage (their own estimate)	about $71
Shotmint 2 × €59 packs (50,000) + 2 × €19 packs (10,000)	€156
html2pdf.app Scale $39/mo (10,000)	$468
pdflayer Professional $39.99/mo (10,000)	$479.88
PDFShift Business $99/mo (25,000; Growth covers only 5,000)	$1,188
DocRaptor Bronze $399/mo (15,000)	$4,788

Where Shotmint is not the cheapest

• Api2Pdf at almost any steady volume: it charges $1 a month plus bandwidth and compute, which works out to about $0.0005 per small PDF. For light documents rendered every month it beats prepaid packs. The $1 base is charged even in idle months, and its cost grows with PDF size and render time, while a Shotmint credit is one PDF of any page count.
• Under 100 PDFs a month, forever: html2pdf.app gives 100 free conversions every month (1 MB size limit) and PDFShift 50; pdflayer's 100 free are non-commercial. Shotmint's 100 free renders are one-time.
• Features we don't have: PDF/UA and PDF/A output, Prince-quality print CSS (DocRaptor), encryption and watermarks, S3 delivery and async webhooks (PDFShift), Office and other document conversions (Api2Pdf), merge and other PDF operations as an API. If you need one of those, pick that vendor.

When Shotmint fits

Your PDF volume is low, irregular or seasonal (a monthly report run, invoices for a small shop, an export button few people click), or you also want website screenshots and Open Graph images from the same key. Credits are prepaid and never expire: €5 for 2,000, €19 for 10,000, €59 for 50,000, so a quiet month costs nothing. POST /v1/pdf takes a URL or raw HTML with format, landscape, margins and backgrounds (Chromium, so modern CSS works), and failed renders never cost a credit. Code examples: guides for Node, Python, C#, Java and more.

Comparing screenshot APIs instead? See screenshot API pricing compared. All comparisons: alternatives.